Google Moving Towards Peer Reviewed Network

New enhancements on the Google content network

8/07/2008 05:01:00 AM

Today we're announcing some key enhancements on the Google content network (partner sites for which we provide advertising) that will offer a better experience for users and better value for advertisers and publishers. These enhancements are the latest result of our integration with DoubleClick and our commitment to making advertising on the Google content network more efficient and accountable. When we purchased DoubleClick, we talked about how we would empower agencies, advertisers and publishers to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, and provide a better experience for our users. We are happy that we have been able to deliver on this promise already, like support for third party vendors on the Google content network

Read full post on Adwords Blog

Google is slowly rolling out more features to allow advertisers to control where their ads are running in the content network. A quick review of the history;

• First it was all or nothing. Run your ad on ALL content partners or nothing.
• A LONG time after, Google started offering site exclusion- the ability to block content partners.
• About the same time Google offered placement reports which allowed advertisers to see the content partners (websites) that were running their ad. Unfortunately this report aggregated some data, such as lumping Domain placement (parked domains like on GoDaddy), Error pages, and "other" placement results into a single line item. This data alone many times represented over 50% of an advertisers traffic. The reports value was deminished.
• Since the start of 2008 Adwords has increased the detail level of their placement reports, and now you should get detailed statistics on any content partner who runs your ads.
• Keyword and placement targeting within an adgroup has provided further control over who runs your ad and more importantly gives advertisers the ability to lock into a set of content partners and set individual bids for each placement.

This all culminates into an advertising platform that is slowly becoming a foundation for a peer reviewed network. The only piece that is missing is the sharing of data between advertisers in the same vertical. Google does provide share some data if you use Google Analytics and turn on their benchmarking service, but as the name suggests this is very generic data. When true sharing of content partner data becomes available and advertisers are able to define and control the content network the Wild Wild West of content advertising will have been tamed.. slightly.

Today Google is offering more features based on their DoubleClick platform.

Frequency Capping: Enables advertisers to control the
number of times a user sees an ad. Users will have a better experience on Google
content network sites because they will no longer see the same ad over and over
again.

Frequency Reporting: Provides insight into the number of
people who have seen an ad campaign, and how many times, on average, people are
seeing these ads. Improved Ads Quality: Brings performance improvements within
the Google content network.

View-Through Conversions: Enables advertisers to gain
insights on how many users visited their sites after seeing an ad. This helps
advertisers determine the best places to advertise so users will see more
relevant ads.

These new features are all dependent upon the users/searcher allowing a cookie to track their behaviors. A DoubleClick Ad-serving cookie is set any time a searcher visits a DoubleClick publisher and now a Google content match partner. Most users don't even realize that a tracking cookie has been set on their machine, however they will have the ability to disable the cookie with one click. The question remains as to how many users will turn off the cookie and will that skew advertister data enough to make managing campaigns a sloppy endevour?

Frequency Capping is the biggie here. I have heard advertisers complain many times that their ads are clicked on multiple times by the same visitor. This they say, unfairly increases their costs. However, this is more likley a natural user behavior, one picks up the same item in a store and inspects it at least twice before purchasing it. Online comparison shoppers must be visiting the same site 5-10 times before making a decision. So the important question for advertisers to answer will be, what is our limit before we say turn it off. A poor analysis and decision here could cost you.

How is your Bid management tool or manual strategy holding up to the new changes?

Lock in with Google Placement and Keywords

About a week ago Google launched the ability for advertisers to use placements within a Keyword defined adgroup. Although a first read of the Google help files on this can seem confusing it all boils down to this:

A high degree of control over the content network both in matching your ads and the price you're willing to pay.

For those new to Pay Per Click:
A keyword defined adgroup means that only your keywords are used to either match your ad to a search by a searcher, or to match your ad to content found on a Publishers website.

Placements allow advertisers to pick specific publishers (websites) and even sections within a publishers website to target.

Previously you had to run two campaigns a keyword campaign and a placement campaign.
Now you can run both within the same adgroup. Placements of course still only apply to content match only and never to any type of search related functions.

Whats great about this is that previously we had to rely on Google to use just our keywords and other elements to determine if a publishers content was a match for us.

Now we can improve this matching process by telling Google the exact sites and directories within a site to run this matching comparison on. Google first finds all matches for your keywords then effectively filters out all websites except for the ones you have targeted to run your ads on.

In addition advertisers can now control their bids for each of this placements individually. Previously one had to set one bid for content match and hope for the best.

THis new feature will allow advertisers to lock in just the publishers they want to use and turn off any new publishers from running their ads.

A couple notes for others using Adwords Editor (AE) to make vast changes for placements. When I read the FAQ it vaguely talks about being able to target not only sections but individual pages with the new system. I took this to mean that I could possibly target a specific page by entering it in as the placement location. In Adwords Editor, this is possible. No error comes up if you add multiple placements that include URLS that go beyond one directory level down. However once you attempt to post, then you get the errors.

So you still have to keep it to a single level directory. This is unfortunate as a great deal of websites use a convention of naming directories with at least 3 tiers.
website.com/consumer/
consumer/debt
consumer/loans
consumer/housing
consumer/debt/articles/greatarticletotarget.html

In this case we cant target the specific page we want instead we have to rely on the combination of keywords and placement at the website.com/consumer/ level. Google gives us much more control, but not that much control.

There are more questions that need to be answered which I will follow up with later.

How are you going to use the new Keyword / Placement features within Google?